Speakers & Authors

Former cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department Samina Ali is an award-winning author, activist, and cultural commentator. Her debut novel, “Madras on Rainy Days,” won France’s prestigious Prix Premier Roman Etranger Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Fiction. Ali believes in personal narrative as a force for achieving women’s individual and political freedom. She is the curator of the groundbreaking, critically acclaimed virtual exhibition Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, and Vogue, as well as on NPR. She is currently working on a memoir about her near-death experience delivering her firstborn, and her work was recently featured in the anthology “All the Women in My Family Sing.”

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Bay Area Book Festival

Over the weekend of May 4th and 5th, 2019, the Fifth Anniversary Bay Area Book Festival will fill downtown Berkeley with a literary extravaganza that offers pleasure to anyone who has ever loved a book.